Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK

Hi, I’m Lynne Murphy, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex.

Since 2006, my alter ego Lynneguist has used this blog to explore the often subtle differences in American and British English. At first this was a distraction from the linguistic research I do at my day job, but increasingly my professional work has been inspired by the topics here.

In 2016, I was a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, preparing a general-audience book on British and American Englishes for Penguin USA and Oneworld (UK). It's scheduled for publication in Spring 2018, under the title The Prodigal Tongue (with different subtitles for the US and UK releases).

My story so far: I grew up in western New York state and studied linguistics at the Universities of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). My first two academic posts were in South Africa and Texas in the 1990s.

In 2000, I moved to Brighton, England to work at Sussex University. Since then, I have married a Londoner, acquired a British passport, and become a parent. My daughter (b. 2007) is referred to here as “Grover”, in some effort to protect her privacy.